Have you ever wondered what technical SEO is? Well, it is one of the basic facets of SEO. However, it is really crucial that you will spend your time enhancing the website’s technical SEO.

Technical SEO is the special method of optimizing the crawling, indexing along with executing the phase of the website in order to attain higher search rankings of your website.

What Does A Technical SEO Include?

Technical SEO embraces augmenting the technical features of the website in order to aid your website rank higher in the search results.

Moreover, it is one such sector that covers a broad spectrum of SEO topics and they are- Site speed, Sitemaps, Canonical URLs, Indexing and crawling, Mobile optimization, SSL certifications, Site structure, Image optimization, and internal and external links.

Now, let us have a look at the Technical SEO Checklist 2020.

1] A Mobile-friendly Website

This is the most vital technical SEO tip and is one of the foremost Google algorithm updates. It offers enlarged preference to mobile-friendly as well as the responsive websites. Not least, but in today’s fast-forward times; having a mobile-friendly site is an essential factor for your website.

There exists ‘Page Speed Insights’ that help you determine if your website meets Google’s criteria to get an optimized website for mobile users.

2] Gear Up Your Site

Since you are in a technical SEO space, you should realize that speeding up the tasks is the most crucial thing for you. And making a slight mistake may ask you to pay a lot. Suppose your site is working slowly and is taking a quite long time to respond, Google may ask you to pay a small penalty on your website.

This way, it clearly means that the site may rank lower in SERPs. On the other hand, if your website is responding faster, then no such issues will occur. In this case, your site is taking a long time loading; it is going to impact the user experience. So, why not you try the following steps that will help you get out of the fiasco.

Start Optimizing the site images

Assist the browser caching

Enable the site compression

Focus on lowering the server response time

Make better use of the content delivery system

3]Internal Links Optimization

Yes! It is another important checklist point of 2020. The internal links are a type of hyperlinks which get linked to another page on the same website. Also, the internal linking may have some different influences on its search rankings as compared to the external links.

This plays a key part in making the search engine understand the information structure in a better way for your website along with launching the SEO Ranking Factors with the flexible architecture of websites.

4] Inserting Target Keywords In Alt-Text Of Image

The better practices that you can do for alt texts are keeping it descriptive along with sufficient usage of the actually targeted keywords. Additionally, make sure you are not stuffing the content with target keywords.

If you start optimizing the images then it will gradually lead to the better performance of your website in search engine result pages.

5] Use Canonical URLs To Lessen Duplicate Content Problems

What is more important is that you have to delete the duplicate content on your website. You can make use of the SEO tools like SEMrush to fix this issue and can also scan the duplicate content issues on your website.

Implementing an e-Commerce SEO strategy is the best one specifically when you are running an e-commerce website with a number of single pages. What you have to do is just to navigate the advanced settings among Yoast SEO. Then, you can go to the canonical URL and then can enter the URL of the specific blog.

6] Fix Crawl Issues In GSC (Google Search Console)

If you are rectifying the crawl errors in GSC along with fixing them actively then it would be really great help for your website enhancement.

It is because crawling errors are the serious technical issues that can easily become an obstacle in the performance of your website. It can also result in distracting the web rankings. So, fix them first.

7] Resolve Broken Links On WebSite

Besides just being bad from an SEO perspective, broken links will also harm the user experience on the site. However, there is a very simple way to fix such issues if your site is running on WordPress.

You just have to install the free plugins and once the plugins are activated, one can easily scan an entire website every 3 days for broken links concerns. Also, you may receive email notifications when the plugins detect broken links on the site and then you can go and fix them promptly.

8] Performing a Technical SEO Audit

The audit is an integral part of every SEO be it on-page SEO, off-page SEO, or even Technical SEO. Basically, a technical SEO audit report allows you to check into the errors and mistakes that are pulling your website back from ranking on the first page of Google SERP.

When the web crawlers find these technical issues within your website, then their crawl budget allocated to the site might get reduced and that would get results in fewer pages being indexed and crawled.

Moreover, the sites with major technical issues may be pushed to the inside pages of Google SERP that would result in a lower CTR.

9] Generate A Sitemap

What sitemaps does is to make the crawling and indexing of significant pages easier for search engine bots. A sitemap is an XML file that is any website’s part responsible for enlisting every crucial page that has been made available to search engine bots in order to index and crawl.

If you have a properly set up XML sitemap then you will ensure that the crawl budget of your website is used most accurately by the search engines.

In the absence of a sitemap, Google along with other search engines may uselessly crawl and index those pages that no longer matter for you which will eventually eat up the budget of crawling.

10] No Duplicate Content!

Having duplicate content is one of the prime reasons behind the failure of websites’ rank for the targeted keywords. If a site has the same content published in different URLs then the search engine bots fail to understand which one to rank.

This leads to zero rankings of both the pages. Use tools like SEMRush so as to provide an elaborated insight into the duplicate pages. Being a website owner, you can identify pages that have to be reserved and the ones that need to have vanished.

11] Look For SSL Certificate

Google is always careful and keen while ranking websites and with the passing time, Google has been mindful of enlisting and ranking only those sites that do not harm their users.

Gradually, they started taking privacy on a serious note. At the beginning of 2014, Google concluded that SSL certification is an essential ranking element. Suppose you are performing a small test with a keyword.

Then you can see websites with HTTPS certification in the very first place. It is easy to implement but there are some website owners that have not succeeded to implement SSL. It results in a huge loss of organic pulling of leads.

12] Look If There Are Errors in The Search Console

Google search console is an apt place where you can find a lot of technical errors that may sometimes get missed. Recently, Google Search Console is one such dynamic tool that can offer you day-to-day based performance.

However, you can see two sections over there that are Index Coverage Issues and enhancements sections. These give you various inputs as per the technical SEO errors waiting with the website. The Index Coverage issues report offer you a summary of every page that will have crawl errors and indexability concerns.

On the other hand, an enhancement report offers you the basic idea of the tasks your website is performing with the required speed. Along with offering the idea of various schemas in order to show opulent snippets.

13] Reduce Render-Blocking Javascript, CSS and Structure HTML Aptly

If you perform a speed test with Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you will see a dialogue box that will contain a message, “Now, Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content suppose you have some blocked resources causing a delay in executing your page”.

14] Control the Number of HTTP Requests And Resources

When we talk about the website’s speed reduction then the first thing that comes to mind is the number of resources. When a user enters or visits your website, a communication is made to the server to use the requested data.

It is just like a normal equation that the more size these files have, the more time it will take to respond back to the required activities.

Generally, quick as well as a number of requests makes a server slow down. However, it is a great mixture of several factors that make up this. But still, you can simply compare it to moving or copying a large file on a hard disk against moving or copying a number of small files.

If you observe, then the small files take longer to copy because the disk needle keeps on moving. However, it is different from SSD technology where there exist no needles. But there are a lot more tasks to imply in order to copy multiple files.

15] Follow A Browser Cache Strategy

The browser cache has all the potential to automatically save the resources on the visitor’s computer. It starts occurring since the very first time they visit a new website.

Afterwards, when users access the site the second time then these resources will assist them to receive the desired information at a faster speed if they come back to that specific page.

This is how the page load speed is improved for re-visitors. Now, for all those visitors who wish to return to a page or to visit a new page in a specific moment that is hard to be accessed, there’s always the option to view the cached version with the help of SERP.

16] Reduce Number of Redirects While Eliminating Redirect Loop

Did you know that redirect loops can definitely save you from a lot of fiasco in concern with link equity as well as broken pages? But, it can also bring you in a lot of issues if you have a heap of them with you.

What happens is a huge number of redirects that will slow down the speed of loading your websites. Remember, the more the redirects, the more time a user is required to spend to jump on the landing page.

17] Loading Only Essential Stuff

With the passing times, sites are aligned to get clogged up with numerous useless media such as images, plugins, and functions that are really never used. Do you know why?

Suppose you are using WordPress, then for an instance, you might test a number of plugins and might install them on your website. You would do this only to find out that you do not really have them required.

At such times, surely, you can restrict them and can then eventually uninstall them. But the problem with WordPress’s uninstallations is that they’re usually untidy and will leave traces in your database. This is why it becomes slower.

18] Go For The Most Favored Version

It is your major responsibility to make sure that all your other versions are aiming to the perfect as well as the chosen version of your site. If people are accessing a version then they should spontaneously get transmitted to the accurate version. Know from below what these versions are.

https://www.abc.com

http://www.abc.com

https://abc.com

http://abc.com

If you choose to have your preferred version as https://www.abc.com then all other versions should be 301 directly to the preferred one. However, you can also start testing if this is alright in the tool of SEO Audit.

What you can do is to move simply head to Indexability and then to the Preferred Domain. Wait for ‘Everything is OK’ message or text. If you cannot get it then you have to restart everything and then proceed.

19] After Site Migration Fix-Up The 301 Redirects Correctly

It is known that site migration is the most acclaimed activity if the website is changed entirely and also if the same domain is of no use any longer. If you set-up the 301 redirects then it can be seriously applied while you are making a transfer from HTTP to HTTPS and then want to the realm the equity link.

While on the other side, in concern with the site migration, it is highly crucial to set up the redirects accurately. If you wish to avoid losing lots of links and your site has broken pages on it, it would be really best to follow a correct 301 redirection process. Hence, you must take into consideration the next recommendations and then move on.

20] Your Resources Must Be Crawlable

If you are having any non-crawlable resources then it is a critical search engine optimization technical problem. However, crawling is the first step that comes even before indexing and welcomes the true content in the user’s eyes.

Usually, Googlebot crawls the data and then passes it to the indexer that renders the page. And after that, you’ll see that specific page ranking in SERP if you are lucky enough.

21] Efficiency in Handling Error 404

Do you know when a 404 error occurs? Well, it occurs when there is no content available in the specific URL of the website. However, it can also happen if you mistype any of the URL or the content is deleted or even the URL is changed.

Such a page not found error can get simply tackled in WordPress or also in another custom CMS. Additionally, you can generate a custom 404 page that will get displayed when the users see a 404 error.

22] Implementation Of Structured Data

Talking about the structured data then it actually plays a huge role when it comes to showing the result. Most probably, it is essential after the latest Google updates. Did you know that structured data informs search engines about the data of users?

Though structured data is an integral part of the technical SEO, it is due to your need to add code to your website in order to fetch it appropriately.

Also, it can help you develop the presentation of your SERPS’s listings either through featured snippets or through knowledge graph entries, etc. This increases your overall CTR.F

So, guys, these were the top technical SEO Checklist 2020 that every Technical SEO agency follows. GBIM is one of the leading agencies that focus on offering technical SEO service to a number of clients.

About Dharmesh Patel

It is with great pride and utmost responsibility I humbly accept being known as Mumbai’s visionary creator of successful SEO values. I have professional expertise in developing target rich SEO campaigns, Google Adwords, Facebook Marketing, Google analytics tactics. I also possess a gamut of associated technical know-how. As the Co-founder and director of Mumbai’s best SEO company, GBIM Technologies I have the resources and capabilities for optimizing online businesses to accomplish target goals. Over five years of focused learning and experience in SEO and digital marketing has honed my skills, improving organic search engine rankings for online businesses. I achieve set targets with a unique and creative approach based on research and analysis.